Dangerous Wishes is written in three movements (sections in which action rises, peaks, and then declines). The first movement is one of discovery as Dom arrives in Thailand, explores his new home, meets new people, experiences the streets of Bangkok, and visits Lek's room. The action rises from hints that the house is haunted until Lek's cart is destroyed, then it declines until Dom and Lek agree to go to Lek's village to look for the jade Buddha.

The next movement is a journey of a stranger-in-a-strange-land, in which Dom starts as the stranger surrounded by customs he neither knows nor understands. The action of this movement peaks when the jade Buddha is removed from the corpse of Duan, declines rapidly with Duan's thank you in Thai on an English computer, and then rises sharply into the third movement, the flight. Each movement has its own characters, locations...